Journal: Westminster Theological Journal
Volume: WTJ 06:2 (May 1944)
Article: Augustine Is With Us Still!
Author: David Wesley Soper

WTJ 6:2 (May 1944) p. 133

Augustine Is With Us Still!

David Wesley Soper

IT IS easy to forget neither Pelagius nor Augustine, particularly in our era, for from whom does our betraying exalted view of human moral capacity derive if not from Pelagius, and of whose counsel, voicing an estimation of man as creature under God, do we stand in greater need than that of Augustine? In the one is given a real man and a verbal God; in the other a real God and, to a degree, a verbal man. It is at once evident that Pelagius and not Augustine is the prevailing prophet of the present, that Augustine has today but a minority following. It is also evident, is it not, that civilization built upon an overestimation of the moral power of man has come to chaos? Perhaps almighty man is less almighty than he has been led to assume. Perhaps it is necessary for him to recover a sense of his creaturehood under God. For what is the base of the present frontal attack upon humane government but an excessive view of man, which is to say, man viewed as though he were not in relation to transcendent Deity? Indeed, what philosophy fathered this exalted notion of superman, now laying siege against humanity, but the identical estimate, of man as without need of humility, prevailing in the democracies under attack?

It may well be that the attack on democracy — that is, democracy as Christianly understood — is itself the anti-toxin designed to immunize our man-centered culture against its own virus of self-sufficient pride, a counter-irritant to offset our own over-leaping view of man, a fire to check wildfire.

Augustine, I affirm, is with us still — perhaps as a minor prophet only to our distorted vision — and it may not be amiss to consider once again, and with care, himself and his leading ideas.

WTJ 6:2 (May 1944) p. 134

Our global wars, if man be a reality, are but loud echoes of the greater war within every human. Certainly Augustine was, in this sense, a man of battle. All the historic wars of the mind and the map were, literally, brought to sharp focus within him.

His father was a pagan and his mother a Christian. The pagan freeman, Patricius, regarded Christianity, much as the later Pietro Bernardone was to do, with cool contempt. The Christian mother, Monica, endured with silence her rough-willed husband and did not always come off the loser in their struggles. In the case of their son, she was at last the victor. Augustine was thus born into a home where the pagan-Christian world battleline was already clearly drawn, November 13th, 354 A. D., in Numidian North Africa, at Tagaste. Shortly before his death, about the time his son left for school at Carthage, Patricius became a Christian. The stout pagan learned to kneel with the subtly stronger ...